Posts Tagged ‘global society’

Love the way Unilever are integrating sustainability communications into their Facebook page here – which currently has a healthy 697,000 likes. Within the dedicated ‘sustainable living’ tab on its app the brand asks people what they do and don’t want to hear about from its three sustainability pillars.

The thumbs down sign is almost, but not quite, a forbidden ‘dislike’ button. But in any case negative responses are not displayed – it seems only total thumbs ups are shown.

Participation numbers aren’t high – but that’s probably because it’s buried half way down a secondary tab on its main brands app (and not sure how long it’s been there). They also might want to consider integrating voting with some sort of incentive, e.g. a charity donation – like Petplan UK are doing at the moment on their Facebook app:

The growth in Social media use and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are inextricably linked. With access to real-time information on companies are up to, and what the world work thinks about it, social media holds businesses to account. And they know it. So more and more, companies are seeking to be perceived as socially responsible. For example, by backing positive, healthy initiatives, like the London 2012 Olympic Games.

And it works beyond the perception. Behaviour is changed. Positive outcomes are achieved, e.g.

“Procter and Gamble, another Games sponsors, has also been doing this for a while. One of its many brands, Ariel, ran a campaign called Cool Clean to try and get customers to wash clothes at 30 degrees. Peter White, P&G’s global sustainability director, says proudly, “In the UK, only around 2% of consumers were washing their clothes at 30 degrees or lower in 2002. By 2011 this had risen to over 30%. In the Netherlands it has reached over 50%.” He also points to a Pampers-Unicef collaboration that vaccinated over 100 million mothers and babies in 46 countries against neo-natal tetanus.”

Tim Smedley on the new Guardian Sustainable Business Social Impact hub

But how can we measure programmes relatively? Consistently? As brand managers, marketers or CSR professionals?

Unilever, in partnership with PSI and Facebook, hopes to harness the social graph to address one of the world’s most critical challenges: access to clean water… When [Facebook] users sign up to Waterworks, they partner with an individual waterworker, making the connection personal. The waterworker in the field is equipped with a smartphone, able to send updates back to partners through photos and videos. The updates post to the partner’s Facebook page, so all of their connections also see the impact the donation is making- how many liters of water the donation has provided and the number of people whose lives have been changed by the clean water.

The toughest thing for the probabilistic magazine brand is to find some kind of coherence. In the traditional sense, coherence as a package of interrelated content is gone. The story is the unit that matters, after all. But a big part of the value we add *is* structuring the world in a consistent way. So, the question becomes: what can form the basis for a new coherence for magazines?

One answer that is specific to The Atlantic but extensible is very old: moral purpose. This magazine was founded as an abolitionist publication and that helped structure the varied voices that ran in its pages through the early days.

The purpose of writing on blogs, community sites like Comment is free, and much of social media is to start or further a conversation – not to share a few writerly pearls of wisdom… Too much of the conversation about comment threads is about how writers – people paid to serve an audience – feel.

People with enough privileges don’t have to worry about their public identities and reputations, but marginalized or vulnerable people around the world face real danger for speaking out online. They still need the ability to participate fully. That’s why a truly Web-wide reputation system cannot be subject to any company’s “real names policy.”

Paul Resnick proposed the idea of “expensive pseudonyms” via an identity-issuing authority that could release “once-in-a-lifetime” pseudonyms and protect the real identity of individuals while making it costly for them to forge multiple identities. Kaliya Hamlin, on the other hand, stressed the importance of “Limited Liability Personas” to allow users to keep multiple personas (and their attached reputation values) in different contexts, and allow them to dump a single persona if for any reason it got screwed up (without affecting the reputation of other personas).

Last week while I was sunning myself my lovely colleagues at Porter Novelli hosted a Social media week event, presenting research into social media behaviour across Europe – focusing in upon gender differences. The event was run by our UK head of digital, Helen Nowicka, and entitled Men are from Foursquare, Women are from Facebook.

The presentation was based on the EuroPN Styles survey 2011 – an annual study of 10,000+ people across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands. In terms of Facebook and Foursquare, it found that European men check in more than women – for example in the UK 45% of UK men use social media to check-in to places compared with only a third of women.

The overall take-out for consideration across social media campaigns, including and beyond Facebook and Foursquare, is that:

Women tend towards interacting with friends and family, using social media to build existing and close connections, whereas men tend towards sharing their status, including location, and sharing opinions with those they do not know in person.

This is borne out with other platform stats – in the UK, 34% of men vs 27% women are on Twitter, and 34% vs 24% write a blog.

Of course demographic groups and individuals will always vary (stereotypes / categories = tensions in between)… but it is useful to have these overarching trends in mind. I, for example, have never been inclined towards checking-in, mainly for privacy reasons – but am far more likely to be found spouting unsolicited opinions than sharing holiday snaps with real-world nearest and dearest.

Perhaps I will take to Pinterest, like the other ladies (when I stop sulking about my name being taken)… isn’t that a bit like opinions in the form of pictures? Apparently 83% of US users are female (I’m putting the current UK male skew down to early-adopter tech / marketing community excitement). On the other hand… I’d rather a thousand words than a picture most days.